Azure Pricing for of Stretch Database in SQL Server 2016

New feature which was introduced with SQL Server 2016 is Stretch Database which migrates our historical data transparently and securely to the Microsoft Azure SQL cloud. Stretch Database provides some benefits to the users, but also has its own limitations which make it less likely to be used as of now, unless Microsoft comes up with significant improvements. Stretch Database in a SQL Server instance requires at least one table. It then silently begins to migrate the historical data to Azure SQL Database. If we are storing historical data in a separate table, then we can migrate the entire table. If our table contains both historical and current data, then we can specify a filter predicate to select the rows which need to be moved to Azure SQL database. Also, importantly, Stretch Database ensures that no data is lost if a failure occurs during migration. There is also retry logic to handle intermittent connection issues that may occur during migration.

Stretch Database lets us choose retention times of our choice even for large amounts of data without breaking the bank. Depending on our performance requirements, we can choose a performance level, and then scale up or down as needed. Stretch Database charges for Compute and Storage are charged separately, so we choose to only pay for what we use. Compute usage is represented as Database Stretch Unit (DSU) and customers can scale up and down the level of performance/DSUs that we need at any time. We have options for pricing based on different locations based on the currency. If we consider USD, below are the sample pricing options for usage of computing resources,
PERFORMANCE LEVEL(DSU) PRICE
100 $1.25/hr (~$930/mo)
200 $2.50/hr (~$1,860/mo)
300 $3.75/hr (~$2,790/mo)
400 $5/hr (~$3,720/mo)
500 $6.25/hr (~$4,650/mo)
600 $7.50/hr (~$5,580/mo)
1000 $12.50/hr (~$9,300/mo)
1200 $15/hr (~$11,160/mo)
1500 $18.75/hr (~$13,950/mo)
2000 $25/hr (~$18,600/mo)

Outbound data transfers are charged at regular data transfer rates. A sub-region is the lowest level geo-location that you may select to deploy your applications and associated data. For data transfers (except CDN), the following regions correspond to Zone 1, Zone 2 and Zone 3.